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Reading, writing and thoughtlessness
Learning to read well is one of life’s greatest joys, not least because reading is power. The same is true of learning to write well. The ability to write clearly and simply is both pleasurable and very useful. Fortunately, almost everybody is capable of both and both can easily be taught. Unfortunately, these days few schoolchildren and students learn either.
Despite all the money that the government has thrown at education, huge numbers of children arrive at secondary school unable to read properly for their age or for their studies. That is well known, despite new Labour’s empty claims of success in education. What is less well known is that most students arrive at university or at colleges of further education unable to write properly. Most of them have little or no idea of how to set out an essay or of how to express themselves in writing at all.
This is not merely my own opinion. The Royal Literary Fund (RLF) last week published a report, called Writing Matters, on student writing, and the author Hilary Spurling gave a short lecture at the Royal Society of Literature summarising its findings. “Most contemporary British students arriving at university lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing,” she said. “Growing numbers are simply not ready for the demands that higher education is — or should be — making of them.”
These findings come from a scheme that the fund set up in 1999 to send professional writers as RLF fellows into universities and colleges to help students with the basic skills of writing essays, reports or job applications. Since then more than 130 writers have worked in more than 70 institutions.
“What is worrying,” wrote one, “is that these young people are students of English literature at an ‘elite’ university. They ought to have attained, by this stage, a reasonably high level of written proficiency, but they are plainly floundering. They have genuine difficulty in writing a basic English sentence.” What the fellows discovered in all disciplines, at all levels, in all institutions, was, they unanimously felt, shocking.
It is indeed shocking. Quite apart from the unspeakable waste of young people’s abilities and the lifelong impoverishment of their minds, there is a wider social problem. Inarticulate and semi-literate graduates fall straight into what is now recognised as Britain’s skills gap. It is very odd, at a time when people take an increasingly utilitarian view of universities as places to produce workers, that they increasingly fail to do so.
The director of the Heads, Teachers & Industry trust recently said “there is a growing sense in industry that graduates are no more useful as employees than school-leavers. Transferable and functional skills such as communication, writing and comprehension are lacking, and companies often find it more cost-effective to employ school-leavers and train them themselves.”
Across the country employers say the same thing, in both private and public sectors. The graduate recruitment manager for Network Rail told a researcher that his organisation currently has to reject 50% of all job applications from graduates because they are “gobbledygook”. A recent CBI report suggests that low basic skills lose a typical business with 50 employees £165,000 a year, while separate figures published last week by the TUC estimate such shortages cost companies £10 billion a year.
There cannot be a university teacher in the country who would not agree that most students now have serious problems in writing because they have not been taught how to order and express their thoughts. Talk to any gathering of dons.
Foreigners from the former Soviet bloc and the Indian subcontinent almost read and write better English than British natives. British Indians who can afford it are beginning to send their children to school in India, and West Indians send theirs to the Caribbean, where standards are higher.
Why should a problem so well known to those directly concerned be so little known to the general public? Perhaps it is because politicians and the commentariat belong to the tiny minority whose children have learnt to write effectively at the tiny minority of schools that still teach it. But there is a great divide in this country between the few young people who know how to write clearly and the great majority who don’t. It is a terrible injustice. Articulacy is now a privilege for the few.
Good writing isn’t just a matter of presentation. As my ferocious history teacher used to say, if you can’t express something clearly, it is because you don’t understand it clearly. And even if you do understand it, if you haven’t learnt how to order your thoughts and construct a line of argument, you will appear not to do so. If students cannot write clearly, that is evidence that they cannot think clearly; they have not been encouraged to do so. But why not?
There are many directions in which one could point a finger of blame — at bad schools, at bad teaching, at the shortage of able teachers now that able women have many other opportunities besides teaching, at failed methods of teaching reading, at child-centred learning and other disastrous educational orthodoxies, at the abandonment of grammar and learning by heart, at the distractions of computers, at tick-boxes and coursework, which encourage laziness and internet plagiarism.
If the chancellor throws even more taxpayers’ money at schools, as he promises, without addressing any of that he will be wasting money to betray yet more children and students.
The RLF is providing a great public service. It has helped and continues to help thousands of students to write more effectively and confidently. Professional writers know about the practical business of writing simply and clearly and seem to be good at communicating this skill. Their results as fellows were good, and rapid; “all the students we successfully helped”, said the report, “expressed something close to joy at the result”. As so often, this inspired and pioneering work is the result of an independent charity, free of government orthodoxies, targets and bureaucracy.
I hope it remains that way, and that in his determination to colonise the voluntary sector, Gordon Brown doesn’t get his joyless, statist hands on it.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 26, 2006 | Comments (0)
A murderous system claims more lives
Last week Daniel Gonzalez was found guilty of the murder of four strangers. He is by any standards a disturbed young man with a long history of bizarre and violent behaviour. He was aggressive, obsessed with knives, once diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, once sectioned under the mental health act for assault, once jailed for assault and a chronic drug user. Hours before the murders he ran naked through the streets and threw knives across his mother’s kitchen floor.
His family made incessant requests for help that they say were ignored. “Does my son have to commit murder to get help?” his mother wrote in one letter to social services. Only a month before the murders, Gonzalez himself wrote to a doctor, begging to be locked up, because he felt paranoid and close to a breakdown. “Please, please help me, this is very urgent,” he wrote. “I really, really do need medical help.”
Nonetheless, this dangerous young man remained at large and in September 2004 he went on a three-day rampage and stabbed two men and two women to death. Allegedly he was obsessed with slasher movies, wanted to become famous as a serial killer, and was even trying to imitate the film A Nightmare on Elm Street. At his trial last week the jury rejected his claim that he was not guilty of murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility — he claimed that demonic voices in his head were driving him to kill — and found him guilty.
It seems to me irrelevant to concentrate, as the trial did, on whether this young man was mad or bad. In cases like this, that is not a useful distinction. Psychiatric labels and distinctions are notoriously subject to fashion and change. Mad or bad, he was terribly dangerous. He had, judging from the evidence, all the obvious signs of it from his childhood and his family was extremely concerned. He was at one time officially considered mentally ill. He was diagnosed in 1999 as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A psychiatrist warned him that his constant drug abuse could lead to psychotic behaviour.
Yet more recently specialists concluded that he was not mentally ill, and was even cunningly fabricating the symptoms of mental illness; the jury thought that too. Personally I should have thought that it was evidence in itself of madness — of diminished responsibility — to break into strangers’ houses and kill them horribly just for the buzz of it; sane people don’t do that.
As his family said last week: “This tragedy is one of human and organisational failings. We have posed over 100 questions to the police and the health services — we want those questions answered. Why, despite our incessant pleas to health services, social services and the police, was Daniel often turned away, passed from one group of professionals to another and left without the support and help he so obviously and desperately needed?”
This painful truth emerges again and again. The murder of John Monckton, the Chelsea banker, raised alarming questions about the probation services. The parole board let one of Monckton’s killers out of jail despite an official assessment that he was 91% likely to commit a violent offence again. As for the probation services that dealt with him thereafter, four officers were suspended and a report by the chief inspector of probation found “collective failure”. (The officers have been reinstated.)
Such “failure” is almost bound to occur under the government’s early release arrangements. Prisoners are normally considered for early release after serving half their term; a three-man panel then has an average of 20 minutes to look at a report from prison officers and from the probation officer who is due to supervise the offender after release. Following the withdrawal in April 2004 of funding for interviews, the panel usually does not set eyes on the criminal it is setting free. The risks are glaringly obvious and are compounded by recruitment problems and overwork in the probation service, along with a departmental shake-up and merger with the prison service.
The Climbié case and others have revealed the chronic inadequacies of social services. They can perhaps best be judged by what happens to children in care, and it is not good. The state makes a bad parent and its foster children all too often end up illiterate, unemployed, delinquent and in jail. As for mental health services, the care in the community movement did away with many secure psychiatric wards, so there are now few places, and some of them are hell holes. As a result deeply disturbed people like Gonzalez now have to take their chances in the so-called community, a risk to themselves and to others.
And our prisons are overcrowded; it’s no coincidence that there is growing pressure on judges and magistrates not to send people to jail. Only last week it emerged that the Sentencing Guidelines Council is likely to recommend that rapists and other violent sex offenders should serve shorter sentences.
The painful truth is that we need more prisons and more secure mental hospitals. The public needs protection. In the end we don’t care whether dangerous people are mad or bad or abused in childhood. We just want them to be kept away from us — rehabilitated if possible, but locked up. Parole and tagging are not working.
The usual liberal cry that this country locks up more people than others is simply misleading. It’s true that Britain imprisons more people per capita than any other major European country. But as the think tank Reform points out, that doesn’t take into account the relatively high level of crime in this country. There is more crime per capita here. Given the levels of crime, we don’t lock up many people relatively. A more revealing measure of a country’s imprisonment rate is the number of prisoners per thousand crimes committed. On this scale, Britain sends fewer people to prison, relatively, than most European countries.
If there were more prisons, they would be better prisons. They would be less crowded and less brutal. They could offer more help and guidance to prisoners; inmates would spend less time banged up and more time on rehabilitation, on learning to read. Some prisoners, like Gonzalez perhaps, cannot be helped. But they can at least be kept from harming others, and that ought to be done in much more civilised surroundings than we have now.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 19, 2006 | Comments (0)
